Sunday, April 21, 2019

Biff’s Easter Message 2019

Today, Easter Sunday, Passover, the first Sunday after the
full moon following the Spring equinox, many people celebrate an event that may
have happened about 2000 years ago in Palestine; others celebrate events that
may have happened in the Bronze Age in Egypt; yet others celebrate more ancient
traditions of springtime.

But who looks 2000 years and further into the future? By
then most of the world’s great ice masses, already out of equilibrium with
today's climate, now over 1°C warmer than before we started burning the coal,
will have melted, raising sea levels by 50 metres or more. Many of today’s cities
will lie deep underwater and much of today's most productive farmland will be
drowned. Unless rapid mitigation measures are enacted immediately temperatures
will rise to the point at which much of the Earth's land surface will be
uninhabitable. Civilisation as we know it will have been long gone. Whether the
human species will be extinct or whether remnant populations will have found
ways and means to survive is uncertain. What is certain is that the Holocene,
those several thousand years of climate stability during which human
civilisation developed and then inadvertently and irreversibly, changed the
Earth's climate, will be long gone.

This moment is our best, our only, our last chance to change
course. It requires a rebellion against all that led us to this position.

In the UK some continue to claim that the UK is a world
leader on climate change. They point out that in 2008 the Labour government
introduced the Climate Change Act. At the time, the UK was indeed the world
leader, but of a very poor bunch. Not only was that legislation weak and not
fit for the purpose of saving civilisation from climate catastrophe, but the UK
is currently on a trajectory that will miss the legal commitments:

"Climate Change Act 2008 Section 1. The target for 2050

(1) It is the duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that
the net UK carbon account for the year 2050 is at least 80% lower than the 1990
baseline."

The current Secretary of State, Michael Gove, is acting
outwith the Law.

#ExtinctionRebellion does not call for 80% reduction by 2050
but 100% reduction by 2025. It is an ambitious target which itself will only
mitigate and not stop the destruction. Some decry it as too difficult, even
impossible. Not achieving this target, however, brings intolerable consequences
for the next generation.

The gulf between government complacency and the existential
requirement of the next generation is unbridgeable. Either the government will
change or the lives of our grand-children will be nasty, brutish and short.